Court Rules Gloucester County Violated Open Public Records Act

Gloucester County is back in hot water for violating open government laws.

Superior Court Judge Timothy Farrell ruled Wednesday that the county violated the Open Public Records Act in not fully complying with a request by David Burnett dating back to March 2008.

Burnett, of Clayton, is a former director of the county Republican Executive Committee. The county freeholder board is under Democrat control. 

“Mr. Burnett would never have received the information located but for this litigation," Farrell wrote in his ruling, noting that the county’s position “flies in the face of a plain reading of OPRA.”

Under the ruling, the county has 60 days to release all the records related to Bennett’s OPRA request–and certify that those records have been released–and pay $91,443.85 in attorney’s fees and costs.

It also requires the county to provide written documentation of appropriate procedures for handling future OPRA requests.

The ruling does not, however, impose a civil penalty, at least partly because the suit was against the county itself. Judge Farrell indicated that even had an individual–a public official, employee, officer or custodian–been named in the litigation, the civil penalty would still not have applied, as he said the facts don’t support that OPRA was “knowingly and willingly violated.”

Attorney Mark Cimino, who represented Burnett, called it a victory all around that reaffirms the importance of OPRA.

“This is not only a win for my client, it’s a win for the people of Gloucester County, and it’s a win for the people of the state of New Jersey,” he said.

Gloucester County Counsel Matt Lyons, however, said the decision was more about Cimino collecting legal fees than defending OPRA.

“We still have stacks of documents that Mr. Cimino requested that have been sitting in our office since 2008 that he never picked up,” he said.

Cimino said the three-year process, from the start of Burnett’s original OPRA requests to the final court decision this week, was marked by numerous challenges in how the county and its attorneys handled the matter.

“They weren’t holding anything back in terms of their litigation strategy,” Cimino said.

That meant throwing up legal roadblocks along the way, Cimino said, including an attempt to quash subpoenas of the county’s insurance carriers–a move the court called meritless–that eventually turned up even more records that hadn’t been disclosed.

Ciminio said that if the county had chosen to use its resources to simply pull up the records requested under Burnett’s OPRA filing, instead marshaling them for a legal challenge, then things could’ve been settled far more quickly, and without the courts having to get involved.

The ruling comes after an incident last year, where the county freeholder board was forced to have a court-appointed monitor because of Open Public Meetings Act violations.

“This isn’t the first time that the county has thumbed its nose at open government laws,” said Cimino. “It’s government that just doesn’t get it.”

Lyons said the county hasn’t made a decision on what to do next as yet.

“We are in the process of reviewing the balance of the decision and our options with our attorneys,” he said.